The whole scene arrived in the middle of a week when the story of the Prodigal Son is the lectionary passage, about as gift wrapped as a sermon illustration could be. Nomar Garciaparra, longtime and well-loved shortstop for the Boston Red Sox who was traded away, came home day before last, to retire. Though the…
I can’t say I have ever heard God speak out loud, but I think I’ve come close. Whatever God’s voice actually sounds like, I think I come close to hearing it when our children lead worship. Last Sunday, they led our call to worship by lining up in front of the Communion table and singing…
In order to survey, Kit said, you always have to have two points. In a photo, he leans over his tripod looking through the scope, high above Otowi Bridge in northern New Mexico, sighting a distant point on the other side of the river . . . I thought of him as making sense of…
I pastored a small rural church while I was in seminary. On more than one occasion, I asked directions to go visit someone in the community I didn’t know and I would be told, “Well, they live in the old Turner place.” Come to find out, the Turners had been gone a good thirty years,…
we pass the silver plate of broken bread with less confidence than we pass the peace easier perhaps to hug than to admit our hungerwe take and eat without a word and wait for the wine’s weaker friendshot glasses of salvationwe place the emptiesin the pew racks causing the clicking sound ofsolidarity to rattleour hearts…
We’ve been spending Saturday mornings during Lent with Job at our church: coffee, fruit, pastries, and suffering – what a way to spend a weekend. I’m the discussion leader and the guy who starts the coffee pot, so I get there early to get both the pot and my mind percolating. This morning we looked…
I had a little time to read this afternoon and began Peter Gomes’ book, The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus. The opening quote read: The great principle dominating the composition of Scripture is that of the ascent towards discovery. — Henri Daniel-Rops What is the Bible? A half hour earlier, I was listening to NPR’s Talk…
A friend of mine is taking a song writing class. I talked to her today, interrupting her homework, and she told me her assignment was to write a song full of clichés. The dictionary says a cliché is “a sentence or phrase, usually expressing a popular or common thought or idea, that has lost originality,…
Yesterday, March 2, was my parents’ fifty-fourth wedding anniversary. It was also Texas Independence Day, and the birthday of both of my friends, Todd Lake and Lance Laird. All of those hold significance in my life, but I have to say today, March 3, matters more. It is not a holiday (that I know of)…
Today I worked on a project that was off the menu, if you will, along with the other prep I had to do to get ready for dinner. One of the organizations in Durham that works hard to figure out how to feed and house folks who, for whatever reason, are hungry and homeless is…